Re: Larry Wall, on Tcl

On Dec 14, 5:12 am, "Donal K. Fellows"
<donal.k.fell...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
tom.rmadilo wrote:
But the idea that something must have a reference count that would
inform the need to garbage collect seems impossible in Tcl.

It's not impossible as it happens, since you can do tricks with the
reference counting in Tcl_Objs. It's not something that's strictly
within the language semantics (boo!) but it works pretty well anyway, as
users of Jacl, TclBlend and TCOM can attest. (It's not full-blown GC,
but that's actually not needed so often as there's not that much need to
do circular structure references in Tcl.)

Right, but Jacl, TclBlend and TCOM are Tcl applications. If you get to
the C level, where pointers exist you can do this, if you expose
pointers to the Tcl scripting level, I guess you could do it too, but
AFAIK, regular Tcl you can't lose a reference and not consider that a
bug, since there would be no way to remove it.

I wish someone would explain why the need to GC could be considered a
good thing if you use a language that strictly speaking cannot create
garbage.
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Larry Wall, on Tcl
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  • Re: Larry Wall, on Tcl
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  • Re: Larry Wall, on Tcl
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    (comp.lang.tcl)
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